Under smoky skies and in the faint echoes of crashing, screaming combat, the dead silhouette of the stiltwalker lay before us, oozing fluids and generally looking three shades of wrecked.

I sighed as I examined it with a scavenger’s eye. There was a lot of good loot to be got from it, I was sure. But we couldn’t exactly rip pieces out and ruck them over to the workshop, back and forth through the city, without getting found out.

“We’re screwed, aren’t we?” I asked, placing my hand on one warped and gnarled plasti-steel foot.

Elli stood beside me, eyeing the joints and dented breastplate.

“I don’t know. We might be able to get it moving, but attunement would be an issue for sure. I’ve never seen a mech like this before in my life, and if I’m to be honest, it looks just as barbaric as those people that attacked the city.”

“Well that's judgy,” I joked. “Mechs can’t choose how they look, Elli.”

“Ugh, whatever. Now’s not the time for joking, Al. Anyway, I could probably get it hobbling, but I don’t think it’d listen to me once we go into the cockpit.”

CD’s hologram popped up on the mech’s mangled leg, grinning ear to ear. He still had the same face as his farmer hologram, but he’d adjusted his image slightly and was now wearing the orange-capped attire of one of the city’s infantry. It was interesting seeing him close-up like this; the infantry were the sort of dicks that you stayed away from and didn’t look at too long when they were milling about in uniform.

I examined the helmet, noting how it gleamed in the sun, and wondered if that wasn’t a defensive feature to use against enemies in midday. The visor, too, was something I’d never really paid attention to either. It was translucent plastic and had to cost quite a penny. That made me wonder how much of an impact it would take to break it.

True to form, CD was also clutching one of the blue-steel plasti-halberds. Other than the occasional flicker, he absolutely looked the part, which only made it even creepier. He hadn’t been out once near any soldier and was yet able to copy them perfectly.

“Carry on, ape-citizens. Your hero has arrived. The banana bank is safe under my watch!” CD said in a stern voice, mimicking the soldiers. “I’ll take watch while you get this thing ready to move.”

We stared, unsure of what to do.

“Fix this thing, you lazy apes! Get it moving!” CD exclaimed. Looking from me to Elli, the hologram’s shoulders slumped. “Yes, of course, you would need instructions on how to actually do it. Elli, I expected better of you.”

“Hey,” she blurted. “I can fix it. It’ll just take too long.”

CD walked over to the mech, surveying it like a human would, though I expected that was more for show than out of necessity.

“Ahh, yes, I can see the problem. It is much like giving an ape some blocks and a round hole. It might take days before they push the right object through.”

A diagram sprouted out from his image to land in the dirt before Elli. She knelt, reading over the words and taking in the shapes.

“But, would that really work?” she asked in a hushed, awed tone. “It’s so simple!”

I knelt to take a look as well, but I might as well have been reading old script for as much as I understood any of it. CD took one look at me and tsked.

“I will scan for simians, and if any of them approach the area, I will warn them off,” he stated. “Ooh ooh, ah ah, no bananas here. Should be enough for most of them.”

“Wait,” I said, standing back up to face him. “What about attunement? If Elli can even get it working, how will we move it?”

“If?!” Elli grumped, already moving to the hulk and reaching into an exposed mess of rubber-tubed arteries. “I’ll have it up in 5 minutes. Won’t last long, but we can get it as far as my mech bays I’d guess.”

“Al,” CD said, surprising me by actually using my name directly. “I can attune to sapient beings much in the same way sapients can attune to mechs. I can, briefly, attune to you as you attune to the mech, giving you complete control over its motions while also holding my breath to avoid the ape stink. Oh, and you will have a nasty case of the pains once we’re done, but hey, someone needs to be the mule, right?”

There it was. I knew the respect wouldn’t last. I nodded and turned to Elli.

“Anything I can help with?”

“Yeah, hold this here and—”

Several nerve-wracking minutes later, the mech stood, though it was still spilling fluids and sparking harder than a welder, but it was certainly serviceable. We climbed up the mech’s body, using its many cracks as leverage, then slipped into the cockpit.

The insides of the barbarian's mech were a mess of sparks and smoke with a large dent in one side of the spherical interior. Under dim red-lensed light, the design was best described as crude yet functional, where high voltage electricity danced along exposed wires. Their endings glowed bright orange as if they had just been pulled from the depths of a forge.

The space was cluttered with furs of various beasts, tanned and cured in a way that would have been familiar to the cavemen of old, and at the heart of it all sat a throne cobbled together from simple metals and plastics. It was more than just a seat; it was a collapsible command chair attached to the middle of a plasti-steel bench, which in turn spanned the width of the cockpit. It was easy to see the purpose of the bench—it offered not just a place of command but also a makeshift haven for the barbarian to carry allies or perhaps captives alongside him across the treacherous landscapes of the wilds.

The control panels were a patchwork of old tech and wild technologies, but they were similar enough to the stuff our own people produced that they weren’t hard to figure out. Screens flickered with intermittent data, their displays chock full of foreign sigils and runes that I couldn’t understand. There were the regular levers and buttons, of course, but they were worn past what our knights would have considered acceptable, the fingerprints of the dead pilot practically worn into the rubber and plastic of their make. And in spots on the cracked plastic of the control board, there lay drops of congealed blood.

“This is considerably more apish than I would have expected,” CD said, his holographic face contorted into an exaggerated grimace.

“You don’t say,” I muttered.

“Well, I do, in fact,” he replied, either not picking up on my sarcasm or deciding not to take the bait. “The technology of my people being reduced to cave dwellings is an affront to nature. As I help you both ascend in power, I expect you to redress these misgivings and to civilize the simians under your tribal command.”

I put up a finger to protest, but sniffing the air and smelling urine, I found that I couldn’t disagree. I put my hand back down and slipped into the driver’s seat.

“Hey, wait a second. Shouldn’t I drive?” Elli protested. “I’ve piloted mechs before. Briefly, sure, but I have some experience at least.”

“Elli,” I said, breaking in before CD could cause some problems. “Look, you heard him. There will be a lot of strain on the pilot’s body, so in case shit hits the fan, you can still save us.”

Her expression softened, turned into a scowl, and then into a grin.

“Damn right! And when I do save you, let’s just say that you have no idea what I’m going to do to you,” she said with a wink. “Now hit it before this thing falls apart.”

“Alright, you primates!” CD began, his voice carrying a mix of derision and excitement. “We’re not ready yet. This mech has been imprinted on its pilot, so we will need to bypass the main power relay. There's a secondary circuit panel beneath the left control console. You'll reroute the power through that, and it’ll be like the mech’s been reborn. It’ll take any pilot after that.”

“Imprint?” I asked as Elli sprang to action, already popping the panel open.

CD nodded.

Stolen novel; please report.

“If you spend enough time with a mech, it’ll grow a bond with you. A vague one, since they aren’t too smart, but they’ll gain familiarity with you and if used long enough, they attune to you the same way you can attune to it. My sensors indicate that this mech has been a very long time with the man you just murdered in cold blood. Ohh, the barbarism! I’ve been reduced to taking pity from barbarians!”

“Murdered? Hey!” I protested. “Stop acting like you’re any kind of victim here, you ass. Get us out of here and I might start thinking of you as more than just a heap of circuits.”

“Apes do that regularly, so it’s fine,” he said, ignoring me. “I’m just happy you didn’t tear down some of those pelts and fashion them into a loin cloth.”

I heard the clatter of tools and the occasional curse coming from Elli as she reworked the power routing.

“These hydraulics are shot, too. By my estimation, we’ll need to preserve the juice we have left to get through the city. Elli, do you see the pressure valves down there? You're going to manually adjust them to compensate. It's going to be rough, but it'll hold for short bursts of movement. Just don't expect to outrun any city guards, even though they’re no better than armored gorillas,” CD said, rushing through the words.

“Was just about to do that,” Elli complained. I heard the sound of metal torquing, and then she popped her head back up, her face and overalls covered in black, brown, and red smudges. “That all?”

“Now we attune. Alaric, take my physical body and give it to Elli. Now, Elli, hold it against the base of Alaric’s neck.”

She reached across me, and I awkwardly pressed myself farther back into the seat as her body rubbed against my own. For a moment I felt as if she was doing it on purpose, but the thought was only fleeting and passed quickly. There were more immediate concerns to worry about.

She was back in place in a moment and pushed the cylinder against the back of my neck. That’s when the hurt began.

The pain was immediate and searing, a sensation that went beyond smashing my thumb with a hammer and transcended into the realm of stepping on a sharp actuator with bare feet in the middle of the night. It burned through me, raising the hair on my arms and tingling my tongue with sharp lemon-tasting frizzles of electric might. The back of my neck burned where Elli pressed CD, and for a moment, I thought I was going to pass out.

Elli’s hand found my own, and I clenched it hard, my eyes finding hers and riding through the warmth I found there. All at once, it ceased.

“Welcome to godhood,” CD whispered in my mind.

“Is that it, then?” I asked. “Are we ready to go?”

CD snickered in my mind, and all at once, I was flooded with ice, a cold, dark ocean of monstrous membranes, electrical wiring, and rubber tubing. I could vaguely sense pulsing cores of energy in various parts of my body, but none more powerful than the core that occupied my chest itself. I reached out, feeling it squirm under my hesitating grasp.

“You are its master, Alaric. Stop being an ape and show it what it needs to do.”

I pushed my mind into it, giving the mech instructions and images of how to stand and move under my direction. I could feel the cockpit rumble as the mech accepted me and stood, and my vision blurred as my mind, directed by CD, accepted the new visual sensations of my mech host.

I scanned my surroundings, seeing the mid-tech cobble under my feet from a distance that I was quite unused to. The disparity between its height and my own was dizzying, and I could feel myself taking a step backward, barely avoiding a fall.

“Steady,” CD commanded, and I stood stock still, getting my bearings. The cold, icy feeling seized me even more, allowing me to feel the mech as an extension of myself. It was an odd sensation, one like wading into slushy water but instead of freezing to death, it became almost pleasant in a way.

“You two ready yet?” Elli asked hurriedly.

I was dimly aware of her hand still interlaced with mine, barely able to process that I had another body besides the one of the mech I was piloting. With some difficulty, I managed to nod, then I took my first steps forward.

The core hummed within me, a faint sense of purpose and even joy rolling through me from its light sapience. I could feel the sluggish flow of its hydraulics gurgling through me as if they were my own veins and blood.

I wondered how it would feel to get hit in one of these things, then pushed the thought aside and started setting off for Elli’s place. After all, I’d find out soon enough. And luckily, the damage that already existed didn’t manifest itself in my body as any sort of pain. Just a flashing alert, a bit of discontent that existed in the back of my mind.

Under CD’s guidance, I coaxed the stiltwalker into a cumbersome gait, its movements unsteady but purposeful. As the mech sparked under every laborious step, it also lurched and groaned, feeling as if it was about to break down any moment and give up its ghost.

But I could feel, intrinsically, that the mech was up to the challenge and I pushed it on, scanning the city with my new robotic eyes.

The streets of Alnda, normally bustling, were now eerily silent, save for the distant echoes of battle. The people, it seemed, had evacuated to the farthest reaches, leaving this part of the city to the rats, bugs, and a single catlike monster that we crushed as we made our way through.

Our progress was slow but definite, and those few people that we did see ran at the sight of what appeared to be an angry and wounded mech.

As we made it through the streets, the renewed sound of boulders slamming into the wall and buildings near it told me that the fighting was far from over. I pushed the mech fully forward, desperate to get home and get it hidden in one of Elli’s mech bays.

Half a mile from the sanctuary of her engineering shop, our borrowed time almost ran out. The mech, which had carried us thus far, let out an agonized groan, dropping to a single knee. Pain poured through me, but I resisted, showing it not just mental images of what I wanted it to do, but also of the cozy bay that awaited it, and the repairs that would be made on it if it could just get off its ass and get moving. Anger flooded me, and the mech responded, popping back up and lengthening its strides.

How much of that had been me, the mech, or CD, I didn’t know, but we were moving again, and that’s all that mattered for now. The city scenery changed and the homes expanded in size and quality. The majority of them were in great condition—timber buildings covered in plastic siding, actual glass or plastic windows, and even small gardens on public display in the small lawns that preceded the doorways to their homes.

A few of the homes grew flowers instead of food, their splashes of green and floral hues brightening the entire neighborhood, and proclaiming to anyone who came through here that these were not people who struggled.

Elli’s home was a different story. It was shabby and in ill repair, with some of the siding missing, cracked, or sagging. The lawn was bare packed dirt, not a single cred spent on it by which to brag to her neighbors. Next to it was her workshop, two large smoke stacks rising out from the back and a large gate instead of a regular door marking its entrance. And next to that were the twin gleaming goliath structures of her mech bays, massive brick and steel boxes that could theoretically even hold a 70-ton Machspauser, those champions of mech melee combat.

The neighborhood was silent and empty as I stumbled up to one of the massive doors. They were closed, but Elli got out of the mech and I lowered her to the ground. She jumped the last several feet and hurried inside. Seconds passed and then the gates started clinking open as we waited nervously to get out of the open. If any one of the neighbors had been watching, they could easily report her and get a hefty bonus for their trouble.

The mech stumbled again, and I sent it soothing images of state-of-the-art diagnostic and repair jobs, replacement parts, and new armor plating. The mech put out one hand, steadying itself against a plasti-steel panel adorned with the emblem of the mech-engineering guild, Elli’s name embossed along its bottom chevron, and a moment later, the door was fully open and we slid inside.

The massive doors closed behind us with a resounding thud, the space within coming alive, rows of overhead arc lights flickering to life as Elli turned them on from below. I disengaged from the mech, coming back to my senses, and felt startled by how thick the air felt, the scent of oil and metal choking and making me sneeze.

CD disengaged from me, plopping to the floor of the cockpit with a resounding clang, his hologram flickering back to life beside me.

“This might be the most civilized place I’ve seen in your society so far, ape. It is a symbol of might, I dare say. Possibility even.”

I sneezed again and stuffed him into my pack. He didn’t protest, strangely, as I got out of the cockpit and stepped onto a walkway ringing the gargantuan structure.

“How many creds—” I started, but Elli, coming up a long metal laddered, shushed me loudly.

“Enough that I have to worry. So, first time to the bay, serf boy. You know, if I tell the guards a serf is in our neighborhood, you’ll be in a bit of trouble. But I might be convinced not to tell anyone if you play your cards right.”

I laughed and scanned the bay before me. Above, high ceilings crisscrossed by steel beams and conduits gleamed metallic in the artificial monster blood light, and about every ten feet or so there was a walkway that ran all around the perimeter of the bay. Along the walls, shelves and cabinets brimmed with neatly organized tools and parts, from small cogs to intricate circuit boards.

And in one small corner, I spied a desk full of blueprints, outlines, and a sketched picture of myself. Elli caught my gaze, followed it to its target, and blushed.

“Not a word,” she chided. “Or I sell you along with that mech.”

I put my hands up and made a zipping motion across my lips.

Moving to a side panel, she toggled some switches, pulled a lever, and as I watched, a docking station pulled out from the wall, grasping the stiltwalker mech and shuddering it into place. Hydraulic lifts engaged with a hiss and cradled the machine's battered frame with gentle precision. The smell of scorched electronics filled the bay before all of the systems finally sighed into silence.

“Now what?” I asked as she pulled away from the panel.

“Time to go out and see if anyone needs to be pulled from the rubble. It’s not only the right thing to do, but it will also be a great alibi if we need one,” she said with a wink.

“Wait, no! Do not put me in there!” CD protested as Elli opened a safe and pushed the motherboard inside. “I hate dark places! Oh, I know . . .you want to get rid of me! Leave me to rot so you can go back on your word! Simians! I will never trust you again!”

“CD, stop being so melodramatic,” Elli said with a deep-set frown. “It doesn’t suit you. Besides, we need to see if there’s any news about a sneaking mech.”

“You promise?” he asked almost pleadingly.

“We do, now shut up so we can—shit,” I cursed, almost falling through my legs. “I . . .don’t feel so well.”

“Hah! I told you! The almighty me has struck you down, you ape! Take that!”

Elli shot him a glare, and he shut up.

“Is it the toll on his body you mentioned earlier?”

“Yes, of course. He’s just a weak ape. I’m surprised he even made it this far as his body is just . . .weak. Though . . .yes, he has a rather strong aptitude for syncing up with mech cores. How odd.”

“Well, there goes our plan,” Elli sighed and sat next to me on the steel walkway, getting me to my feet with an arm draped over her shoulder and walking me to who knew where. “So, what now?”

“Now? We wait.”